HELPING MOMS BREAK THE CYCLE
Survivors empowered to leave life behind
Years ago, a sex trafficking survivor who had recently given birth came to see Cherie Jimenez.
She wasn’t bonding with her baby.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she told Jimenez.
The girl had been sold for sex since she was a teenager, Jimenez recalled, and had never been nurtured herself. Her baby’s father was her pimp.
Jimenez never forgot her. Most of the women Jimenez helps at The Eva Center in Boston — a survivor-led program that helps victims of sex trafficking — have had children. Often times, fathered by their pimp.
Jimenez, a survivor of the sex trade, joined law enforcement officials, sex trafficking survivors and victim advocates who took part in yesterday’s sex trafficking and opioid crisis roundtable at the Herald, which followed a special report on the growing crisis.
Sex trafficking victims often come to Jimenez when they are pregnant, wanting to escape. She’s worked with mothers whose children were put into foster care and ended up in group homes.
“You know how that’s going to repeat itself,” Jimenez said.
Now, she hopes to start a program that would help sex trafficking survivors who become mothers. The program would pair a mother with a nurse or trauma specialist for the first three to four years of her child’s life. She’d learn how to become a mother and bond with her child. And she would “learn what they didn’t get so they don’t repeat the same cycle,” Jimenez said.
“The beginning years dictate everything to us.”
Jimenez has worked on cases with Boston police Lt. Donna Gavin, head of the department’s anti-human trafficking unit, who agrees that it’s an intergenerational problem.
“We’re seeing these young people aging out of the child welfare systems and then they start to have children with some of these pimps,” Gavin said.
“We had one guy who fathered nine children. And those poor kids end up back in the system,” she said. “We really do have to worry about those little girls and boys.”
All too often, pimps threaten the mother of their children, telling her to sell her body for money — or she won’t see her child.
“He still wants her to work,” Gavin said. “He still wants her to bring in the money.”
Convicted Dorchester pimp Raymond Jeffreys, sentenced to 30 years behind bars last fall for running a nationwide sex trafficking operation, fathered about 15 children with six different women.
“That’s really typical,” Jimenez said. “This is constant. We’ve worked with a number of women that had three or four kids from a pimp.”
It’s a tragic cycle, but one that can be broken if more people do the difficult work like those who were on our panel yesterday.